A month or more later she wrote:  “Poor Douglas is getting restless.  He has caught every kind of fish there is to catch, and hunted every kind of animal and bird, in and out of season.  Harley has gone home, and so have our other guests; it would be embarrassing to me to have company now.  So Douglas has no one but the doctor and myself and my poor aunt.  He has spoken several times of our going away; but I do not want to go, and I think I ought to consider my own health at this critical time.  It is hot here, but I simply thrive in it—­I never felt in better health.  So I asked him to go up to New York, or visit somewhere for a while, and let me stay here until my baby is born.  Does that seem so very unreasonable?  It does not to me, but poor Aunt Varina is in agony about it—­I am letting my husband drift away from me!

“I speculate about my lot as a woman; I see the bitterness and the sorrow of my sex through the ages.  I have become physically misshapen, so that I am no longer attractive to him.  I am no longer active and free, I can no longer go about with him; on the contrary, I am a burden, and he is a man who never tolerated a burden before.  What this means is that I have lost the magic hold of sex.

“As a woman it was my business to exert all my energies to maintain it.  And I know how I could restore it now; there is young Dr. Perrin! He does not find me a burden, he would tolerate any deficiencies!  And I can see my husband on the alert in an instant, if I become too much absorbed in discussing your health-theories with my handsome young guardian!

“This is one of the recognized methods of keeping your husband; I learned from Lady Dee all there is to know about it.  But I would find the method impossible now, even if my happiness were dependent upon retaining my husband’s love.  I should think of the rights of my friend, the little doctor.  That is one point to note for the ‘new’ woman, is it not?  You may mention it in your next suffrage-speech!

“There are other methods, of course.  I have a mind, and I might turn its powers to entertaining him, instead of trying to solve the problems of the universe.  But to do this, I should have to believe that it was the one thing in the world for me to do; and I have permitted a doubt of that to gain entrance to my brain!  My poor aunt’s exhortations inspire me to efforts to regain the faith of my mothers, but I simply cannot—­I cannot!  She sits by me with the terror of all the women of all the ages in her eyes.  I am losing a man!

“I don’t know if you have ever set out to hold a man—­deliberately, I mean.  Probably you haven’t.  That bitter maxim of Lady Dee’s is the literal truth of it—­’When in doubt, talk about HIM!’ If you will tactfully and shrewdly keep a man talking about himself, his tastes, his ideas, his work and the importance of it, there is never the least possibility of your boring him.  You must not just tamely agree with him,